The sun-bleached wreckage on a beach at Cayman Brac in the Caribbean doesn't look like much. A tree has grown over the hull and decades worth of leaves and needles have fallen across it.

Souvenir hunters have stripped it of its name plates and a vandal has spray-painted the words 'Dream Boat' across the transom. It could be any boat fallen on hard times and left to rot.

But closer examination reveals that it is one of the most famous yachts of all time, and one which is in the spotlight again now thanks to Hollywood film.

Businessman Donald Crowhurst of Bridgewater disappeared in 1968 after entering the first Sunday Times around the world yacht race. The circumstances of his death have never been resolved. His yacht the Teignmouth Electron was eventually found on Cayman Brac in the West Indies

The wreckage is all that remains of Teignmouth Electron, the yacht on board which Donald Crowhurst intended to complete the round-the-world race for the Sunday Times' £5,000 prize in 1968.

The new film The Mercy, starring Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz, tells the story of the doomed voyage. Filmed on location in Teignmouth, it is out in cinemas on Friday February 9.

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Crowhurst sailed from the mouth of the Teign on October 31. He hit problems almost immediately as a result of issues with the boat and his own inexperience.

The remains of Teignmouth Electron

Faced with the agonising choice of either quitting the race and facing humiliation and ruin, or carrying on and risking death in the Southern Ocean, he decided to shut down his radio and loiter in the South Atlantic over the winter.

Then, he planned to falsify his logs and make his way back to England, almost unnoticed in last place. But with his deception almost certain to be exposed, he never came home.

Teignmouth Electron

The trimaran was found, adrift and empty, on July 10 1969. There were no signs that it had been catastrophically damaged by a storm or rogue wave and it was assumed that Donald Crowhurst had either fallen or jumped overboard and drowned.

The last page of his logbook contained the words: “I have no need to prolong the game. It is finished – It is finished IT IS THE MERCY.”

After her discovery by the RMS Picardy in the middle of the ocean, the Teignmouth Electron was taken to Florida and later to Jamaica. The Electron’s British funders sold the boat to a young Jamaican entrepreneur called Roderick Bunny Francis, who modified her for pleasure cruises in Montego Bay.

After changing hands again, the yacht was taken to Grand Cayman and then to Cayman Brac, where she remained in service as a diving boat until 1983. Suffering slight damage, she was hauled on to the beach for repairs, but was dropped from a crane and damaged by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. In 2008 the Caymans were hit by the 140mph winds of Hurricane Paloma, which destroyed much of what was left of Teignmouth Electron.

She has stayed in the same place ever since.

Writing on the Pangaea Exploration website last year, Eric Loss said of her: "Shipwrecks are always a bit eerie, regardless of their nature, and the history of Teignmouth Electron only added to its aura.

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"She was shattered, the central hull crushed amidships into a pile of plywood and fiberglass, the amas (pontoons of a trimaran) in slightly better shape, but still peeled open to the elements.

"Even her name was missing – some souvenir hunter had sliced the 'Teignmouth' out of the port side of the bow, and the 'Electron' off starboard, no doubt to adorn some art project somewhere. It was a shock to see, especially as all the photos I’ve seen of the wreck showed the boat still almost whole, recognizably a sea-going vessel.

"Someone had spray-painted the words 'Dream Boat' on the transom in place of a name – oddly fitting, given her history, but cruel nonetheless. Donald Crowhurst’s dream turned to ashes back in 1969, and now this, his dream boat, was rotting away, hidden in the trees.

"This is how all our dreams end, eventually, the wreck seemed to say – regardless of whether they reach fruition or not, are silly or fruitless or foolhardy or successful, eventually you, too, will lie rotting on this beach.

"We sat for a while, listening to the surf on the sand, the wind through the trees, the intermittent flap of a piece of the hull when the breeze caught it just right, then left, silently, and continued down the shore."